Whiff of Hanson as poster boys do battle

Vote of no confidence ... Howard is not popular with the Eastwood Chinese Senior Citizens' Club.Photo: Steven Siewert

John HuxleyNovember 16, 2007

LIKE a ghost of elections past, Pauline Hanson, the founder of
One Nation, threatens to frustrate the hopes of the Prime Minister,
John Howard, to retain his Bennelong seat.

That, at least, is the view of Wilson Fu, the secretary of
Eastwood Chinese Senior Citizens Club, which meets every Wednesday
morning in St Philip's Anglican church hall for tai chi, a talk and
refreshments.

How will the club's 820 members - Cantonese speakers with little
or no English - vote? "Solidly Labor," Mr Fu insists. "They will
not vote for John Howard. They know that he does not like
Asians."

Mr Fu said his members had long memories. They would never
forget what Mr Howard said in the late 1980s about slowing
migration or, more importantly, how in the late 1990s he failed to
speak out immediately against Mrs Hanson.

Mr Wu, 47, a registered nurse who works with the intellectually
disabled at the Rydalmere Centre, admitted he was a Labor voter,
but said any advice given to club members was purely practical.

"The need to vote and how to vote. If anything, people get their
politics from their two newspapers, Sing Tao and the
Australian Chinese Daily."

They, too, have maintained strict neutrality through the
campaign.

How Bennelong's other migrants will vote is unclear. One theory
has it that the longer they have been in Australia, the less likely
they are to vote with their ethnic bloc. Another is that they vote
for the party that let them into the country.

Previous elections suggest Mr Howard commands considerable
support among the broader Chinese community, some of whom mobbed
him on one of his many recent visits to his embattled
electorate.

On one thing commentators agree: that with more than 28 per cent
of voters born in non-English-speaking countries, migrants will
play an important role in determining the outcome of what has
become a 13-way fight for the nation's most fascinating seats.

Rarely in the history of federal politics can an electorate have
been so probed, polled and pork-barrelled; some $20 million has
been pledged on projects ranging from weed eradication on Upper
Kitty's Creek to pavement upgrades on Delhi Road.

Such attention is not surprising. As the ABC analyst, Antony
Green, explains, with a week to go, all the indications are that Mr
Howard remains in serious danger of seeing his 4.1 per cent margin
overturned by the ALP's celebrity candidate, Maxine McKew.

He would be the first prime minister to lose his seat at a
general election since Stanley Bruce in 1929, when in very
different circumstances his Nationalist government was forced to an
election on the eve of the Great Depression and amid industrial
unrest.

While the candidates - who offer a dizzying choice including
Green, Democrat, One Nation, Family First and Climate Change
Coalition - are preparing for a strong finish, many voters complain
of election fatigue.

Dick Vinton, who was last week elected president of Ryde City
Bowling Club, is one of them. "We've had enough. Basically, it's
just one little bloke with glasses against another little bloke
with glasses."

He backs Mr Rudd; his playing opponent, Jim Hamilton, backs Mr
Howard. Neither expects life in Ryde to change appreciably whoever
wins - a common view that suggests Mr Howard has not made himself
indispensable.

Significantly, despite more specific concerns - about interest
rates, workplace conditions, hospital care, for example - most
people interviewed by the Herald this week saw the choice in
Bennelong in basic, national leadership terms.

"Mr Howard tells too many stories," said Karlie Elrington, 19, a
child-care worker, of North Ryde, as she wandered through the
Macquarie Shopping Centre. "So it's time for a change. I'd go for
Rudd - though he is a bit of a geek as well."

Marilyn Clark, 28, a financial assistant from Gladesville, was
firmly in the opposing, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp.
"Things have become confused by Howard's plan to stand down. But
I'll stick with him. Life's good. Just look around."

Of course, just how good for the sitting member varies
considerably across an electorate that has drifted steadily
westward since Mr Howard first won the seat in 1974. Then, it
included his family home in Wollstonecroft, now part of North
Sydney.

Subsequently, Bennelong has lost reliable Liberal territory in
Hunters Hill and Lane Cove, while in the most recent redistribution
it gained the more working-class Ermington, whose three booths were
won by the ALP at the last election.

In recent weeks, Mr Howard and Ms McKew, who is standing to win
rather than merely to "divert" her opponent, have taken the federal
phenomenon of "me-tooism" to local extremes by frequently turning
up and being pictured in the same frame, at the same events.

If frontyard party placards out along the electorate's main
arteries, such as Blaxland, Lane Cove and Epping roads, are any
guide, support remains evenly divided between the two main
candidates.

But as Gary Ogg, a long-time Labor supporter who may desert a
party that has become "too middle, too conservative" for the
Greens, attests: little should be read into such public
demonstrations of support.

Mr Ogg cannot get Mr Howard out of the front yard of his small
block of units in Ryde, which contains no fewer than four poster
portraits of the Prime Minister."I don't know where they keep
coming from. No one in this block votes Liberal. Someone must come
round at night and put them in," he said.